A few day ago I wrote a little post on FB about the ways of bypassing Italian censorship based on DNS poisoning of The Pirate Bay (and every other similar situation). Italy, well aware of the errors of the past, wisely decided (lol) to apply another layer of “filtering” based on IP. What does it mean? It means that if you try to connect to TPB from Italy, you won’t get past your ISP.
The DNS poisoning solution was, just like I wrote in the previous mini-paper, to adopt DNS servers provided by OpenDNS. This method allowed the people to reach real IP address of the Bay, and not the localhost (thepiratebay.com and every related subdomain was mapped to 127.0.0.1). This method alone though can’t be used (alone) anymore.
Most of you are already aware of Tor networks, proxy servers and whatnot, but I would like to provide you with yet another solution synthesized in “Opera >> ALL”. Explanation follows.
Whoever knows me also knows that I don’t use any other browser but Opera, best web browser for any existing platform. No, Firefox ain’t better for nothing. But let’s get to the point.
Today I made a discovery pretty interesting about Opera’s feature called Opera Turbo, which works like this:
- Opera Software’s servers download the web page
- Opera Software’s servers compress the web page
- Opera browser (your client) downloads the compressed page
Can you see the pattern here? Well, after a few hours spent setting up a proxy plus tor on my router, I figured out that with a little quick click on opera turbo it’s actually possible to bypass every sort of ip filtering towards any ip address without any performance slowness. Even better, it’s even faster! So:
- DNS Poisoning: use OpenDNS servers
- Censorship/IP Filtering: use Opera Turbo
Opera, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…
I’ll just say it again: if you didn’t do it by now, start using Opera!